Men's Lifestyle September 9, 2026 0 Comments

Inside Trump’s Smithsonian: Unmasking the Shocking Blend of History and Hidden Agendas That Could Rewrite America’s Story Forever

Is there a better spot to soak in the tale of America than the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, especially in this firecracker of a year marking 250 years of what’s been dubbed the semiquincentennial? It’s like the universe handed us the perfect stage—right smack in the middle of a culture war crescendo kicked off by 45/47 himself, who decided no less than to slap warning signs on the museum’s front door, accusing it of anti-American fibs. Yet, here I was, wandering under that strikingly serene blue summer sky, where giant “America 250” banners stretched across the facade, and a melting pot of faces—old timers with their service caps, proud couples flaunting pride colors, stroller-pushing parents, globe-trotting tongues heard in snippets like Japanese and Spanish—basked in a collective spirit of curiosity and pride. Funny thing is, none of that vibe matched the fiery rhetoric boiling just outside the museum’s walls. It got me asking: When history itself becomes the battlefield, who’s really writing the story—and more importantly, who gets to say what’s true? This trip wasn’t just a walk through exhibits; it was a front-row seat to the tug-of-war over America’s soul, all unfolding while the nation wrestles with what ‘truth’ even means anymore. Ready to dive deeper into this cultural clash? LEARN MORE

7 min read

Name a more opportune time to visit the Smithsonian National Museum of American History than the year of this nation’s hella hoopla’d semiquincentennial. A moment more apt than the July weekend when 45/47 stoked his raging culture war with a decree that signs would soon be placed outside the museum as a corrective to un-MAGA materials inside it.

The Sunday I visited the museum under the halcyon blue sky of an Edward Hopper summer landscape, there weren’t yet signs posted warning of the anti-American evils within, but there was gargantuan America 250 signage on its facade. Outside the entrance, sundry dozens stood blathering or roosted on benches or snapped photos or bought snow cones from a dude doling change from a wrist-thick wad of bills. Inside the museum: Diverse droves that included an old guy with suspenders yanking his jorts and a polo shirt screen-printed with an eagle, Old Glory, and “250.” Grandpas with white wisps peeking from beneath their service caps. A young guy wearing a sports jersey and neck-hung Oakleys. Hand-holding couples adorned in pride-themed accoutrements. No few trudging seniors, stroller’d babies, toddling tykes. I heard Slavic tongues, Japanese, Chinese, beaucoup Spanish. The general spirit seemed a mixture of buoyance, curiosity, pride.

But you wouldn’t have known it from MAGA’s incendiary rhetoric. On July 24, two days before my visit, 45/47 issued the executive order “Restoring Trust in the Smithsonian Institution.” In that mandate he claimed the “Smithsonian Institution and the Museum [of American History] cannot be trusted to tell America’s story with honesty and gratitude” and outlined steps to rectify aspects his regime deemed problematic.

On the surface that order was prompted by a 160-page report from the Domestic Policy Council, “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage”—released on the Fourth of July, for effect. Museum director Anthea Hartig caught major flak in the report, including the mention of her telling students at UCLA that history is “a prime tool of social justice” and “the key that unlocks the mysteries of humanity of meaning of place of conquest of love of power, authority and self.”

The report—and subsequent Republican-led Senate subcommittee hearing—accused the museum of adopting “an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.” Among its proposed steps was the sinister suggestion to post signs reading, “Warning: The exhibits in this museum were prepared by people who don’t want you to love your country.”

washington, dc august 20 a sign marks the location of the smithonian national museum of american history on the national mall on august 20, 2025, in washington, dc the museum is one of 19 smithsonian institute museums in washington, dc, and new york, ny photo by j david akegetty images

J. DAVID AKE//Getty Images

I left an exhibit on the Vietnam War at the National Museum of American History wondering where is the line between propaganda and history—and which of the two I’d just encountered.

The review was spurred by a previous executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” issued in March 2025. That decree argued that the Smithsonian museums were under the influence of “a divisive, race-centered ideology.” It authorized removing what 45/47 deemed “improper ideology” from Smithsonian properties, prohibiting spending on exhibits or programs that “degrade shared American values,” and sanctioned the restoration of monuments, statues, and markers at its discretion, even if they deified leaders of Confederates.

The attempted MAGAfication of American history is obvious. This regime is hell-bent on scheming a present that suits it: historically, culturally, and politically. It has characterized its attacks on museums as caretaking the national truth, if not fact-based patriotism, but a C student in a high school history class could discern this historical revisionism to flat-out mythologizing as a best practice for authoritarians.

And yet I vowed to visit the museum with an open mind. My aim was to see for myself how much, if any, overt bias I detected in what I saw.

War was central to three of the exhibits that left lasting impressions on me. In one titled “The Price of Freedom—American Wars,” I saw giant displays of General Hideki Tojo of imperial Japan beside a picture of Hitler beside a picture of Mussolini. While the displays seemed meant to stress three of democracy’s greatest adversaries and their Axis of Evil, I couldn’t help but consider the ironies.

That under Tojo, imperial Japan used thought police (Tokkō) to hunt down and arrest anyone who criticized the imperial system, praised communism, or questioned national myths. That it suppressed scholars who took the emperor or the country’s origins as their subject. It also banned books and reframed their aggressions—invading China, for example—as fostering peace and harmony and civilization in Asia.

The Trump administration has characterized its attacks on museums as caretaking the national truth, if not fact-based patriotism, but a C student in a high school history class could discern this historical revisionism to flat-out mythologizing as a best practice for authoritarians.

That Hitler’s infamy included empowering Goebbels’s Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, an agency that damn near perfected propagandic indoctrination: films, radio, cartoons, newspapers, slogans, forcing the Jews in their killing camps to send postcards home lying about their tragic fate. The Nazis’ scheme to de-intellectualize schooling involved firing teachers and forcing new ones to join their Teachers League, purging higher education of dissenting (Jewish or pro-Jewish) voices, and controlling which textbooks could be studied.

That Mussolini appointed his own minister of education and set about instituting the use of a single state-approved textbook in classrooms. He also banned and burned books with dissenting views, made all political parties illegal save his Fascist party, and promulgated his core slogan: “Mussolini is always right.”

Not long ago I would’ve argued the United States is an irreconcilable distance from imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and Fascist Italy. But how should we view MAGA’s untold ICE detentions and numerous deaths and the boat passengers killed with impunity and the seizing of a sovereign country’s head of state for its oil and the war started with Iran for dubious rationale and the ubiquitous book bans and the attempted commandeering of college curriculums and the litigation against media companies and media members and the threatening of dissenting government officials and the removal or hiding of thousands of crucial datasets and the restoration of Confederate symbols and monuments and the erasure of unfavorable history (like George Washington being an enslaver)? Instead of walking away feeling proud that America had been on the right side of World War II, I left pondering how much MAGA’s reign has in common with the social, cultural, and political schemes of those regimes.

At an exhibit on the Vietnam War, I witnessed a woman brought to real tears by footage showing on a flat-screen of the inside of an old war helicopter. The video looped an ex-Army nurse narrating how soldiers had brought her a Vietnamese baby whose parents were killed and how, after they baptized that infant, the nurse gave her the American name of Kathleen Fields. The woman held a scrapbook with a picture of the baby and news clippings. “So when they say we killed babies, there’s a picture that says we didn’t,” she said, as if that lone rescue were enough to erase the My Lai massacre and America’s other atrocities in Vietnam, as if baptizing and christening a Vietnamese baby with an American name ain’t fundamental to the troubled tradition of colonizing the “uncivilized.” I left that part of the exhibit wondering where is the line between propaganda and history—and which of the two I’d just encountered.

Not long ago I would’ve argued the United States is an irreconcilable distance from imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and Fascist Italy.

An exhibit on the original star-spangled banner—stitched during the War of 1812—also jolted me. Inside the dark confines of the exhibit, I found information on the flag’s sewing, on the family who caretook it, as well as on the penning of Francis Scott Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner.” For all the information included, though, I found no mention of the seldom-sung third verse: “No refuge could save the hireling and slave / From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.” That the museum had omitted a key complicating element of America’s history from an otherwise exhaustive exhibit struck me as paradoxical to Hartig’s view of history as a “prime tool of social justice.”

The most indelible sight I saw was the rhetorical questions posted throughout the museum: “What do you see?” “How does it make you feel?” “How did we become Us?” “How do the promises of the Declaration connect us?” “How diverse should the citizenry be?” “Do we need to share a common national story?” “What are the Rights and Responsibilities of Citizens?” And the only question that included a year (1776) alongside it: “Should enslaved Africans and African Americans be free?”

That last query called to mind one that wasn’t posted anywhere in sight—that truthbetold has dogged me in the days since I roamed the museum: How old is America for Black people?

It’s self-evident, I hope, that it ain’t the 250 years marked by July 4, 1776. (MAGA has tried to de-emphasize that six of the seven core founding fathers were slave owners in their lifetime.) My most generous math marks it between April 9, 1865, and June 19 of that year, when General Granger galloped into Galveston with General Order No. 3. But what, then, should I make of the 100-year reign of Jim Crow, a period during which, among its many oppressions, a multitude of Black people were disenfranchised? (Imagine being asked to guess the exact number of jellybeans in a large jar to vote!) Less generous algebra marks it at the end of Jim Crow, August 6, 1965, which means the America touted during this semiquincentennial is, for Black people, 61 years young. At best.